Sounds of a night
The Waterless Flood managed to kill almost the majority of people, so one could try to imagine how empty cities looked. However, animals turned out to be immune to it. Instead of sounds of traffic and talking, Toby has to listen to “usual noises” at night. That was “the faraway barking of dogs, the tittering of mice, the water-pipe notes of crickets, the occasion grumph of a frog”. The sounds described in this passage are usually left unnoticed by people in the big cities. This imagery helps a reader to imagine what he/she would probably hear, if something would happen to the biggest part of mankind.
Influence of isolation
Isolation could do a rather dangerous thing. The longer a person is isolated from the society, the stranger he/she starts behaving. Toby always checks her binocular, for she doesn’t feel safe even being alone. She “has the feeling that someone’s watching her – as if even the most inert stone or stump can sense her”. She heard enough stories to understand that it could be effect of isolation. She knows that some people can hallucinate, they start seeing “the floating orange triangle, the talking circles, the writhing columns of vegetation, the eyes in the leaves”. This imagery helps to demonstrate how isolation influences people’s minds, creating a rather uneasy feeling.
The worst
Toby had seen a lot in the first weeks after the Waterless Flood. She finds “a tail of a dog beside the path” and she is almost sure that a vulture dropped it here. “She tries not to think of the other things they dropped”. According to her, “fingers were the worst”. This imagery helps to create a feeling of horror. Toby’s unwillingness to remember things she saw is supposed to make readers wonder about that.
